Why Should Tech and Demand Gen Only Support ABM, Not Drive It?

Programmatic ABM

Article | June 9, 2022

In 2021, 70% of marketers reported using an account-based marketing campaign. Since 2020, their numbers have gone up by 15%. One of the reasons ABM has become so popular is that it can greatly enhance customer loyalty and revenue by tailoring the buyer's journey for unique clients. ABM tactics can further enrich an ABM strategy. In an interview with Media 7, Tim Kopp, CEO of Terminus, talked about the account-based marketing process. “ABM flips the traditional approach of generating leads on its head. It doesn’t adhere to the idea that a full sales funnel will create a trickle-down effect leading to high conversion rates. Instead, ABM enables marketers to refine the criteria by which they identify buyers. While marketers might not have the same amount of leads, each lead is targeted and relevant — and thus more likely to convert.” Account-based marketing is being implemented confidently by more and more B2B marketers. It is important to find ways to amplify its impact on your revenue through accurate targeting and conversions. Let us take a look at three effective ABM tactics that can help you enhance your account-based marketing strategy. 3 Effective ABM Tactics for B2B Marketers Improve Your ABM Funnel's Performance Account-based marketing funnel optimization may be one of the most effective ABM tactics to grow your business. The following techniques can help you improve your funnel’s overall performance: Audit Your Content Smartly Check if your content is personalized according to your target accounts' personas and industry. Does it address the specific needs and pain points of your target accounts? Your content can help you narrow down your list of ideal customers. Make Good Use of Intent Data Dynamic ABM targeting is essential. Based on data from your CRM and other platforms, update your list of target accounts. Make sure you have a good idea of what your target audience is looking for. Are there issues with your company, products, or services that you provide? Always use this information to improve your list. Approach Different Markets Confidently Run multiple account-based marketing campaigns with varying degrees of customization and investment parallelly. Choose between ABM Lite (targeting a small number of accounts), Programmatic ABM (targeting many accounts), or Strategic ABM (targeting a single account) according to your business goals. Optimize Engaged Accounts No two engaged accounts can be in the same sales funnel stage. So, optimizing engaged accounts can be difficult. Start by tracking click-through rates, organic website traffic, email open rates, and any other digital interactions with your brand to see how effective your ads are. Your ads must be both informative and visually appealing. Reach engaged accounts through social media, email, and other suitable channels. Unlock Opportunities Lead generation strategies based on advertising retargeting allow your sales team to tap into accounts that have previously interacted with your ads with renewed vigour. By working with your sales team to develop an account engagement model that defines an "engaged account," you can streamline the lead generation strategies by limiting the number of accounts that your team is required to manage. Increase Outreach Your target account stakeholders' employees should be the focus of your outreach efforts. Target accounts can be contacted via direct mail or in-person meetings. As a result, new pipeline opportunities are now available. You can reach a larger audience by using one-on-one C-level campaigns like phone calls and demos. Implement Marketing Automation Artificial intelligence (AI) marketing can help you improve your B2B account-based marketing strategy. It gives you predictive insights and makes your communication more effective. In your account-based marketing process, marketing automation can run email campaigns that can show you how people interact with your account. CRM data is used by AI and big data to get information about people from different platforms. This information can help you make your content unique for more ABM targeting. Account-based marketing services give you the ability to run targeted marketing campaigns at scale. As an account-based marketing service, ABM automation aims to target firms with multi-person purchasing committees extensively by utilizing individualized content and engagement to influence their purchase decisions. The immediate impact of using marketing automation in your B2B marketing strategy is a shorter sales cycle, a free marketing team, better sales and marketing team alignment, and stronger customer retention. You can start off by creating your ICP. After that, you can set up your target account, integrate your account-based marketing strategy with marketing automation software and your CRM. Then you can create impressive campaigns, personalize content, and offer tailored engagement to your target accounts. You can access the performance of your ABM marketing strategy using marketing automation software’s dashboard and tweak your strategy to make the most of it. Analyze and Improve Your Strategy B2B account-based marketing requires regular testing of your ad wording, content, design, and channel aspects to see what works and what doesn't. You can improve the efficiency of your approach by keeping tabs on key performance indicators (KPIs). Instead of abandoning a tactic because it isn't working, improve it by tweaking it. Account-based marketing approaches can succeed only if you assess how they affect your strategy and continually improve its execution. In an interview with Media 7, Abhi Yadav, Founder & CTO of Zylotech, talked about the importance of customer intelligence in marketing. “Tracking every point of engagement is critical in delivering a holistic view of where buyers are actively engaged and what’s working.” Developing an efficient B2B marketing strategy using the ABM approach requires a great deal of trial and error. Optimize your ABM approach by defining and measuring your KPIs. This B2B ABM marketing tactic is crucial to understanding how effectively you are engaging key accounts and moving them forward in the sales funnel. Couchbase Generated $1.5 Million in Pipeline Opportunities Using ABM Couchbase, a NoSQL database provider for enterprises, used a data-based ABM strategy to determine the interests of their target customers. They then combined real-world behavior with system-generated social personas of their customers, which helped them generate $1.5 million in pipeline opportunities. Conclusion These account-based marketing tactics can help you optimize your ABM marketing strategy. Concentrating on your funnel metrics and KPI and constantly improving your strategy can help you get the best results. FAQ What are funnel metrics? Velocity (time spent in days by a prospect in each stage of the funnel), conversion rates (percentage of leads that move from stage to stage in the funnel), and volume (number of leads passing through any stage of the funnel) are funnel metrics. Improving them is a great B2B ABM marketing tactic. What are the benefits of account-based marketing automation? ABM automation is a great account-based marketing tactic. It allows you to set up a marketing process at once and then scale it across different campaigns. With the help of automation, tasks like media buying, modeling, upselling, and ad targeting are carried out efficiently. How can you develop an effective ABM strategy? Start by identifying key accounts. You can then map their decision-makers, create targeted campaigns to get their engagement, decide on the best channels to approach them, execute your marketing campaigns, and finally measure the results of your ABM strategy.

Core ABM

Article | June 20, 2023

Recently, Contentgine, a content-based marketing agency, released its latest ‘Top 5’ research ranking for popular artificial intelligence (AI) related content consumed by B2B decision-makers. The content assets, mostly e-books, that made it to the list focus on predictive analytics, cloud-based machine learning (ML) technologies, deep data analytics, and more. But why are B2B decision-makers so curious about AI and ML? They want to use AI and ML-based solutions effectively to streamline their business processes and improve their marketing strategies. Digital transformation, heightened consumer expectations, and changing buyer dynamics govern the way B2B decision-makers utilize their resources. Let us look at what is making them seek AI and ML-related content on such a high scale: AI Simplifies Decision-Making A survey conducted by SurveyMonkey concluded that 6 out of 10 B2B decision-makers experience decision paralysis—difficulty in choosing an option from a few viable ones—more often than expected. Furthermore, reaching a consensus becomes cumbersome if too many stakeholders are involved in the decision-making process. In such sticky situations, AI algorithms come to the rescue. They leverage heterogeneous data from social media, reports, website activity and more, to offer insights on management and resource allocation, assist in troubleshooting problems and aid strategic development. They alleviate issues that insufficient data and a lack of proper tools to measure metrics pose. They present a clear picture in front of the decision-makers to enable them to make an informed decision. Assists in Lead Generation Forget archaic, standard prospecting tools. You can effortlessly conduct lead generation research using various complex parameters with AI-powered tools. You can also analyze customer behavior, create dynamic, intuitive, secure and valuable lead lists. Sifting through massive lead generation data to discover the client profiles that match your ICP gets easier. On the other hand, ML helps with demand prediction, churn prediction, local optimization, and sentiment analysis, so you can offer an excellent customer experience to your leads. AI lead generation tools such as Conversica, Drift, and LeadCrunch can have conversations with your leads, collect their email addresses, and qualify them even before handing them off to the sales teams. AI-powered lead scoring can help you identify intent signals that your marketing teams might have missed. Optimizes Content Strategy Let’s face it. You don’t want to sell Eskimo ice. Irrelevant content sabotages your chances of creating a lasting relationship with your prospects. Your content should align with your customer’s needs and pain points. Thanks to machine learning, deep content personalization is possible. ML can analyze content assets on your website and send the relevant ones to a prospect at the right time based on their position in the buyer’s journey. AI and ML Are Changing the Game for B2B Businesses According to an O’Reilly survey commissioned by MemSQL, 71% of executives said that ML and AI are game-changers for their business. B2B decision-makers are investing their resources in exploring the advantages of AI and ML in-depth. They are keen to implement AI systems and ML-based solutions to eliminate human errors, continuously analyze vast amounts of raw data, and harness structured solutions to problems they face in executing their business processes. VMWare Uses Acrolinx to Streamline Content Program AI-enabled content solution Acrolinx offered VMWare real-time dashboards on the results of its content activity. The qualitative report helped VMWare focus its resources on making its content better so that it could get more conversions. Closing Thoughts “AI will increasingly determine which firms win and which firms lose.” - Phil Clement, former CMO of Aon. “AI will increasingly determine which firms win and which firms lose.” - Phil Clement, former CMO of Aon. AI and ML can significantly impact business operations and marketing campaigns in the B2B domain. To have a competitive edge in the market, understanding their importance and figuring out where and how to use their power will no longer be a choice but a necessity.

Account Based Data

Article | August 19, 2022

ABX is about quality, not quantity. The traditional metrics that have been used to gauge ABM success are not useful in the experience-centric realm. The new and more complex benchmarks for measuring success revolve around: Relationship analytics Journey analytics Attribution analytics Once you’ve successfully closed accounts, you want to make sure you understand which ABM programs helped to contribute to that sale so you can rinse and repeat. This is where you can evaluate how a vendor measures ABM success and the entire Account-Based Experience. You will want to choose a vendor who can help you optimize your programs from the top of the funnel to the bottom, and grow your customer’s lifetime value. Some examples of metrics to measure include the volume and velocity of an account as it makes its way through the buyer journey. This helps you understand whether your programs are engaging enough as well as whether your sales cycle is too long. A strong ABM vendor will also have different methods for measuring attribution since not all businesses are alike, and marketers love seeing attribution models so they can measure the success of their marketing efforts and ROI. Other metrics to consider include advertising campaigns and website visits – but with an account-based lens. After all, you want to understand whether your advertising is reaching the right accounts and which accounts are engaging on your website. If you find you’re short-staffed, some ABM vendors offer strategic services to help you with your ABM strategy and measurement. To learn more about vendor onboarding and support, read the next section. Because ABX has a different set of metrics than ABM, when it comes to measuring the performance of the ABM solution from the vantage point of the customer experience, the scope also changes. The vendors on your shortlist should, among other features: Offer a dashboard to measure ABM impact from across the funnel. Track volume, velocity and conversion metrics for each journey stage. Offer customizable subscriptions for all custom reports. People and account based heatmaps. Allow you to combine first party, third party, firmographic and technographic data for segmentation and reporting. Allow you to compare the performance of different audiences or account lists and evaluate the impact of specific programs. Enable you to see the engagement and activities that influenced the different stages of a deal cycle. Measuring a journey and a relationship in the long term requires measuring as much data as possible, so find out if they also: Centralize your existing data sources in one location? Track B2B metrics by account? Track and report on anonymous first-touch visitors by account? Have strategic services in place to help you set up ROI reporting based on your strategies? Allow you to compare different timeframes for account stages? Provide advanced BI capabilities for ABM? The point of measuring is to take action based on knowledge and insights, and having an ABM solution that allows you to bring together all of the relevant data points for your decision-making is pivotal for the success of your business. Our agnostic Definitive Guide to Choosing an Account-Based Marketing Platform provides you with checklists like the one above as well as the reasoning behind the need for each of the features outlined in the ebook. Check it out and take advantage of the printable list we put together for your own use at the end of the guide. ABX is about quality, not quantity. The traditional metrics that have been used to gauge ABM success are not useful in the experience-centric realm. The new and more complex benchmarks for measuring success revolve around: Relationship analytics Journey analytics Attribution analytics Once you’ve successfully closed accounts, you want to make sure you understand which ABM programs helped to contribute to that sale so you can rinse and repeat. This is where you can evaluate how a vendor measures ABM success and the entire Account-Based Experience. You will want to choose a vendor who can help you optimize your programs from the top of the funnel to the bottom, and grow your customer’s lifetime value. Some examples of metrics to measure include the volume and velocity of an account as it makes its way through the buyer journey. This helps you understand whether your programs are engaging enough as well as whether your sales cycle is too long. A strong ABM vendor will also have different methods for measuring attribution since not all businesses are alike, and marketers love seeing attribution models so they can measure the success of their marketing efforts and ROI. Other metrics to consider include advertising campaigns and website visits – but with an account-based lens. After all, you want to understand whether your advertising is reaching the right accounts and which accounts are engaging on your website. If you find you’re short-staffed, some ABM vendors offer strategic services to help you with your ABM strategy and measurement. To learn more about vendor onboarding and support, read the next section. Because ABX has a different set of metrics than ABM, when it comes to measuring the performance of the ABM solution from the vantage point of the customer experience, the scope also changes. The vendors on your shortlist should, among other features: Offer a dashboard to measure ABM impact from across the funnel. Track volume, velocity and conversion metrics for each journey stage. Offer customizable subscriptions for all custom reports. People and account based heatmaps. Allow you to combine first party, third party, firmographic and technographic data for segmentation and reporting. Allow you to compare the performance of different audiences or account lists and evaluate the impact of specific programs. Enable you to see the engagement and activities that influenced the different stages of a deal cycle. Measuring a journey and a relationship in the long term requires measuring as much data as possible, so find out if they also: Centralize your existing data sources in one location? Track B2B metrics by account? Track and report on anonymous first-touch visitors by account? Have strategic services in place to help you set up ROI reporting based on your strategies? Allow you to compare different timeframes for account stages? Provide advanced BI capabilities for ABM? The point of measuring is to take action based on knowledge and insights, and having an ABM solution that allows you to bring together all of the relevant data points for your decision-making is pivotal for the success of your business. Our agnostic Definitive Guide to Choosing an Account-Based Marketing Platform provides you with checklists like the one above as well as the reasoning behind the need for each of the features outlined in the ebook. Check it out and take advantage of the printable list we put together for your own use at the end of the guide.

Article | April 13, 2020

Account-based marketing (ABM) is becoming more popular as companies begin to realize that traditional funnel marketing does not produce the same results it used to in the B2B space. ABM gives the ability to personalize sales and marketing outreach on the account level, and technology helps us do it at scale. In this article, we uncover the best tactics you can implement in your ABM strategy to personalize your outreach for marketing, sales & service.